Don't Even Go There—Travel Writing for the Rest of Us

Even if the world is your oyster, you can still chip a tooth on its shell. While travel magazines feature exotic locales of breathtaking beauty, we expose sites so depressing that no traveler this side of Edgar Allan Poe would venture there without a tub-load of tranquilizers. Take Las Vegas (please) and the $5.99 all-you-can-eat buffet line at Sam’s Town. That's the world we explore at Don’t Even Go There.

On this site, we tell of places we’ve visited but wish we hadn’t. We reveal vacation plans gone awry and relate horror stories from the road best abandoned. These true stories reflect where we’ve chosen to go. We only have ourselves to blame. We rarely needed to exaggerate—the truth really is stranger than a Dan Brown novel.

Don’t Even Go There: travel tips for those of us who aren’t escorted by security guards, pampered by wealthy benefactors, or provided a generous per diem. This blog is for seasoned travelers and armchair tourists who want the real world first-hand and head-on, with all its drama, horror, and humor. You’ll laugh at us, cry with us, and decide to stay home more often.

29 January 2012

Back in October 2010, we introduced a feature we called Embarrassing Travel Moment of the Month. While we intended to post a story every month, we have obviously failed. Miserably. Sorry. So you’ll have to settle for the occasional embarrassing travel moment of the month. You can read these short posts in between working at the mill and planning your escape, which we’re sure will lead to your own embarrassing travel moments. —MB & JS
--

For some unknown reason—wait, we know the reason: language—this story, like our previous Embarrassing Travel Moment, occurred in Europe. In Germany, to be precise, where they speak a dialect of English that can sometimes be difficult to understand. Actually, we thought we had a perfunctory grasp of the German language. We could speak well enough to point to something we wanted.

One day, we decided to hitchhike the Autobahn from Munich to Hamburg. It seemed like a good idea at the time, since we were used to hitchhiking throughout Europe and Hamburg was a destination we had never before attempted.

So we packed light (a backpack) and set out. When you hitchhike the Autobahn, you can’t just pick a nice spot on the side of the road. No, you have to hitchhike either from entrance ramps or from Tankstellen or gas stations, which are like rest stops right off the highway.

We made decent time in the morning (thanks to an uncharacteristically early start), but the further north we got, the colder it got. Of course, it was November, but had been pleasant in Munich and we were optimists. (Perhaps you have your own word for it.) In any case, by early afternoon, the weather was downright frigid.

We were stuck in a gas station/rest area. Sure, we could have sought shelter in the restaurant, but we wouldn’t have made much progress that way, so we decided to stick it out and rely on the kindness of strangers.

Now, we have two strategies when hitchhiking. One is to always have some form of luggage, whether it’s a suitcase or a backpack. We like drivers to know we’re not homeless. We have stuff. Our other strategy is to always carry cardboard and a marker to create a simple sign with our destination on it. We like drivers to know we’re actually trying to get somewhere.

On occasion, however, when we’re stuck or trying to be entertaining (at least for own amusement), we write other things on the cardboard. For example, once while hitchhiking in the States, we wrote: “A long way from home.” We’re not sure it worked, but we flashed that sign from coast to coast.

In our current predicament, freezing our gonads off in a foreign land, we once again decided to get creative. So we whipped out a spare piece of cardboard and wrote, in large block letters: “Ich bin kalt,” which translates word-for-word as “I am cold,” which we wrote only because we didn't know the German words for “I am frickin freezing my gonads off.”

We held up that sign, along with the one that said “Hamburg” for another hour. (OK, maybe it wasn’t that long, but even ten minutes in that cold seemed like a lifetime.) At last, a car stopped for us, a car full of giggling German 20-somethings. “Ausländer?” they asked. “Foreigners?”

“Americaner.”

After we piled into the car, they gave us a language lesson. As we discovered, if you want to say you’re cold in German, you say, “Mir ist kalt,” which translates to “To me, it is cold.” So what did “Ich bin kalt” mean? What had we written and advertised to every passing car?

It means: “I am frigid,” you know, in the sexual sense. We really had frozen our gonads off.

An Inside Look

How We Saw It: Our Rating System

We rate each place in ten categories for Don’t Even Go There. These ratings appear at the end of each sorry tale:

• Blight-Seeing—how decrepit a place it is—rated 1 to 5, where a 5 means the place is so disgusting, you’ll almost wish you were in Detroit. Almost.

• Communication Breakdown—how difficult it is to communicate in English—rated 1 to 5, where a 5 means speaking English could actually endanger your life.

• Customer Dis-service—how bad the service is—rated 1 to 5, where a 5 could indicate that you’ll have to carry your own bags, uphill, through a crowd of beggars who, if you’re lucky, will only give you a slight case of leprosy.

• Discomfort Level—how much you have to “rough it”—rated 1 to 5, where a 5 means you better be in top physical shape just to survive the weekend.

• Grunge Factor—how dirty a place it is—rated 1 to 5, where a 5 indicates a need for anti-fungal cream, powerful bug spray, careful food choices, and boiling water before you drink it.

• Inactivity Guide—how many activities are available—rated 1 to 5, where a 5 means a working TV set is an attractive entertainment option.

• Rent-Attainment—how difficult it is to get accommodations—rated 1 to 5, where a 5 indicates a big wad of cash won’t get you the time of day, never mind a mattress and box springs.

• Spontaneous Consumption—how the shopping compares to home—rated 1 to 5, where a 5 means you’ll be tempted to buy stuff you’ll only regret later, especially when you pass through Customs on your way home.

• Fun Fraction—how much fun you can expect—rated 1/5 to 5/5, where a 5/5 can actually be fun, as long as you dress right and take the necessary precautions.

• Vibe-Rating—how the overall experience feels—rated 1 to 5, where a 5 means that, believe it or not, we’d go there again. Don’t expect to see many of these.

An Inside Look

About Us

Mark is living a dream: writing to entertain and inform (luckily, he has a day job). His writing style has evolved from years of jotting down notes in the back of a pickup while hitchhiking. A recovering tech writer, he’s contributed to several published books and edits others for a living. He’s also writing a screenplay.

Jason took a more circuitous path to travel writing. First came the travel, then came the writing. He’s seen his share of places to avoid, up close and way too personal. After completing screenplays and television scripts, he became a filmmaker and video editor. He uses his acute eye to record detail Mark overlooked in his haste to get the hell out of there.

They have teamed up to create the Don’t Even Go There travel series. They hope it will turn conventional travel writing on its ear. They hope it will upset people. They hope it will lead its authors to a book deal, a movie idea, and maybe even a lawsuit.

Meanwhile, you get to experience a new bittersweet comedy vicariously, from the comfort of your computer chair, every week. Keep coming back, and leave a comment so we know you were here!

An Inside Look

Disclaimer

Most of the text and photos in this blog are copyright 2007-2017 by Mark Henry Bloom & Jason Scholder. All rights reserved. Contact us for reuse permission or to find out what we borrowed from another source. We would like to thank all our friends and relatives at this time who, knowingly or not, donated to our blog, some of whom we actually credit. With friends like these, who needs lawyers? Thank you.